Alan Ferrency writes about things.

Category: terrain

We finally made time to play another game of Malifaux. Frank, Andy, JM, and I played two games side-by-side on a 4×6′ board set up with terrain set up for two adjacent 3×3′ boards. This was a good showcase for my Malifaux terrain, so I took some pictures.

The terrain here is an amalgam of pieces from a variety of sources that I’ve collected over the last decade or so.

Malifaux terrain: city and outskirts

Some of the buildings are Mordheim terrain from the box set. Others are completely scratch built and hand painted by Frank. Some are made from inkjet printed walls glued to foam core. The hobo village around the swamp is plastic O scale railroad terrain.

The grave stones and piles of skulls are from Michael’s craft store during Halloween season. The graveyard was scratch built by Frank. There are railroad trees, cast resin stumps, and strips of cloth for roads. The barrels were store bought pre-painted terrain.

Colette versus the Freikorps in the streets of Malifaux

I scratch built the swamps and rough ground area for dual use with DBA and Malifaux. They’re made of thin plastic with rocky sand glued on, followed by paint and flock. The water areas are done with glossy varnish slopped on over the paint.

Frank scratch built the board fences for Warhammer Fantasy, and I built the stone walls using Hirst Arts plaster molds.

Overall, I like the way this terrain looks, works, and stores better than Terraclips. I could see adding a few standalone Terraclip buildings to this kind of game board, but I don’t think I’ll be trying to lay out an entire board of Terraclips terrain again any time soon.

Playing Malifaux reminded us all how much we enjoy the game, and we plan to play again soon. Unfortunately the game seems to be changing faster than we can keep up with, since we don’t play regularly. Luckily it’s still enjoyable with older models.

Here is a camp I built for my Hittites. It is based on images in the Osprey book Hittite Fortifications, c. 1650-700BC.

The wall is built in two sections, each of which is the maximum size allowed for a camp: 40mm x 120mm. The left section with the gate will be my camp for a single Hittite army, and I’ll add the extra wall section when playing BBDBA with a Mitanni ally.

The walls and towers are constructed of styrofoam cut on the bandsaw. The crenellations are made of mat board, and the exposed beams are short pieces of balsa. I brushed on water based primer and varnish, since spray paint and superglue destroy foam.

At this point I’m officially finished with any modelling required before After Tax Day BBDBA.

In response to a recent question from a Fanaticus forum reader, here’s my take on the Terrainguy brown-green gaming mats. I’ve included photographs from a few recent blog posts that show m brown-green mats in action.

These mats are available in a variety of colors and sizes. I have a 4’x6′ mat and a 30″ DBA mat in brown-green, and I’m very happy with both of them.

This is the best looking flocked gaming mat I’ve seen so far, but I know of a few I haven’t seen in person. The flocking material is not static grass, it’s more like the Woodland Scenics “fine turf,” made of very fine ground foam. The mat itself is made of canvas with a rubberized material on the surface that holds the flock in place. Mine aren’t old enough or well-travelled enough to know how well the flock holds up to heavy use, but I haven’t had any problems so far.

For storage and travel, I roll the mat. I would not recommend folding it, I would expect it to get permanent creases. They’re flexible and roll easily. They hold a slight curl when you unroll them, but they’re easy to flatten out.

Overall I’m happy with these for the price I paid, and I’d definitely buy another one if I need any more mats. The larger mats often go on sale, but the DBA mats seem to always be full price. The DBA mats are in a different section of the web site, making them harder to find in the color you want, but all of the colors are available for DBA sized mats as well as the larger mats.

Here’s a picture of the camp I built for my Tlingit army. Since the Northwest Americans are a Littoral army, they will always have a waterway when they place terrain, so I decided their canoes would make a good camp. I left room to add a totem pole, but I haven’t been inspired to build it yet.

The canoes are longboats from Museum Miniatures, modified to look a bit more like Tlingit canoes on the front end. The rear end isn’t right, but it’s the way the canoes looked when I got them. The paddlers with the canoes were totally inappropriate for precolumbian North America, so I didn’t use them.

The patterns on the sides of the canoes, barely visible here, are based on images of Tlingit canoes I found via Google image search and in Flickr.

These are from an O-scale model railroad plastic kit. It’s the Hobo Jungle from Bachmann’s Plasticville USA series. Despite its horrifyingly bad name, there are a few good models in the Plasticville range.

According to the TMP All About Scales page, O-scale is supposed to be 1/43.5 scale or equivalent to 37mm miniatures. In practice, these are great with the 32mm Malifaux figures and fit well alongside Mordheim terrain (intended for 28mm). They’re quite small overall, and most of our 32mm figures won’t fit through the doorways.

I’m not sure how brown can be described as “bright,” but I think some of these turned out brighter than I intended. The rusted metal turned out well enough, though the rust may be a bit too “fresh” looking… or just too bright.

I also have a Plasticville sniper water tower to put together, and I haven’t finished the outhouse from the Hobo Village. I think I’ll put the outhouse on the edge of a swamp terrain piece.